Symphonies Vol. 2

Danish National Chamber Orchestra, Adam Fischer

This CD is released by the Danish National Chamber Orchestra on its own record label DRS, distributed by Dacapo. This is the 2nd volume in the acclaimed series of the complete symphonies by W.A. Mozart, recorded by the Danish National Chamber Orchestra and their renowned Austro-Hungarian chief conductor Adam Fischer. This volume contains five of Mozart's earlier and shorter symphonies composed c. 1767-1768.

"You can imagine the composer smiling in approval.", "If you want these symphonies on modern instruments, played with élan, sensitivity (not least in the exquisitely realised Andante of K43) and a palpable sense of enjoyment, Fischer is your man."

Richard Wigmore, Gramophone

”Fischer judges pace and weight admirably… These are lively and attractive works played with wit and assurance.”

The hunt for a position

by Claus Johansen

Mozart and his father: each was a man of his own time. This led to clashes and created conflicts. Leopold Mozart and his generation lived mentally in the Baroque, a period when musicians were more craftsmen than artists. A dream career for them meant a permanent engagement at the court of a prince or perhaps a bishop. They were viewed as servants, but they could live with that as long as they received a fixed salary and a sense of security.

For that generation, life as a free, self-employed artist was out of the question. Even talented composers like Haydn and Dittersdorf spent much of their lives in per­ma­nent posts, furnishing princes and prelates with huge quantities of utility and occasional music. Alongside this they filled administrative posts, functioning as music teachers, personnel directors and secretaries. They wore livery, and had to promise to appear at court scrubbed and sober. They could not marry or travel abroad without permission. Their compositions belonged to their employer. The salary was good, but they worked hard and long, and they remained servants. This did not matter so much, for it was the life they had been brought up to as professional musicians. It was different with the younger generation, Mozart's generation. The Enlightenment had begun to makes its mark, and they were not content to spend the summer in some remote country house in Hungary. They were unwilling to perform the Taffelmusik at the prince's meals; they wanted to be taken seriously. Mozart's self-assurance was huge, and he was fully aware of his own abilities.

By and large he had two possibilities. One was to do as his father had done, the other was to live as an independent artist unconnected with a court or a city. Anyone who wished to live this way was forced to write operas. Father and son both knew that this could be the way forward. They therefore went to Italy three times, where the very young man proved on several occasions that could write and make a living from modern Italian operas - both the serious and comic kind. His great operas and small symphonies from the 1770s show that he was working his way into the Italian style. There were market shares to be won here by an independent artist. We can see that he also fantasized over this possibility later in the letters from an ill-starred journey to Paris, where he dreams of going to Italy with his beloved Miss Weber, to make her and his fortune on the great operatic stages.

These plans did not sit well with his father's visions. He ordered his son to go to Paris, and, somewhat shaken, witnessed from a distance how his son subsequently turned down a well paid position as court organist and composer at the royal palace in Versailles.

While the son was wasting his time in Paris the father worked, driven by his dream, to obtain a career for him back home. The young man was a violinist with the Archbishop of Salzburg; now Leopold wanted him engaged as conductor and court organist. This mean a potential for advancement, leaves of absence and a good salary rise, but Mozart kicked against the pricks, and found many reasons to continue his now disastrous journey. In January 1779 he was at last back with his father, and sent in his application, which was very tellingly written by his father. He was engaged at a salary of 450 guilders a year. Now he had reached a safe haven, and composed serenades, German-inspired symphonies and a wealth of sacred music for Salzburg.

A few years later he broke free of both the position and his father. He moved to Vienna to live as an (almost) independent artist. He had taken the leap, and now free­dom awaited him. One might think his eyes would now turn towards Italy. Others had gone that way: Gluck, Paisiello, Cimarosa and many others travelled from opera house to opera house, negotiated contracts and earned well. This might sound like a dream for a young man who was obsessed with opera, but there were many obstacles. As a travel­ling opera composer one earned a fee, but no rights to one's work. The theatre profited from a success, the publishing houses from the sheet music to the success, but the composer only received his one-off payment, whether the work was a success or not. The payment could be good if the composer was famous, but it took good negotiating skills, an appetite for travel, and an ability to write music that was popular, and these were in fact not Mozart's strongest qualities. For a period he had returned to his father Leopold's model and had tried to get a post at the courts in Mannheim and Munich. He probably came close, but the eternal reply was \\no vacancies\\. So he abandoned the idea. The opera journeys remained in the realm of dreams. In addition, after 1781, Mozart actually came to like life in Vienna, where even his more sophisticated music was appreciated.

He left his father - and many of his father's values - behind. The explanation of this is that new possibilities had arisen at the end of the eighteenth century. These included the arrangement of concerts, publishing small easy pieces for his instrument and teaching for high fees. That was the career Mozart chose. In 1781 he discovered that one could live as a piano virtuoso in Vienna. He took on a handful of prosperous pupils. Later he hired concert venues, moved his instrument back and forth through the city, hired musicians and composed a string of scintillating piano concertos. There was no more time to write symphonies. When they were required in a concert, he managed with works recycled from his Salzburg period.

Mozart's concerts pulled in audiences: especially from the noble families to whom he did not want to be a servant. They were the only people who could afford them. The prices were sky-high, but the tickets were sold and business boomed. After a number of good years, taste changed and at the same time the country entered an economic crisis. Then it was over. And just when the crisis set in, he took a break from the piano concertos and wrote his last three symphonic masterpieces. It did not help his finances. To be a free artist also meant the freedom to go down with a bang. During the final years he resumed the struggle of his youth for a permanent post, at home and abroad, but he never succeeded.

These facts have provided material for many romantic fantasies about the solitary genius, a tragic figure who wrote his last symphonies for eternity with no thought of money and recognition, but the image does not hold water. He could see how several of his good friends like the composers Vanhal, based in Vienna, and J.C. Bach in London lived the free life - and managed fine. If he had said yes to the post in Versailles it might have cost him his life in the French Revolution. Now he could observe how the same revolution was changing the world. He met independent authors, dancers, actors and artists. They did not take their orders from a noble employer, but of course they accep­ted having the aristocracy as customers as long as they paid. However, their true cus­tomers were the many members of the bourgeoisie who were also willing to pay high prices for printed music and concert tickets.

In the course of a very short life, Mozart managed to work for two bishops' courts and an imperial court, where he was appointed court composer in 1787, but that was mostly an honorary title. He quite deliberately avoided working as a court musician. Times had changed and his father's ideals and dreams were no longer tempting. Many of the artists of the new age worked freelancer, which in no way prevented them from having patrons and sponsors. This provided possibilities for both success and failure. There was no safety net to rescue Mozart's finances, but just a few years after his death the social and economic conditions of musicians had in fact become a good deal better.

Silent appreciation

About Mozart's relationship with his audiences

By Claus Johansen

Italy, January 1770. The 14-year-old Mozart is the headline name at a concert in Verona. His father writes elatedly: \\The number of people, the shouting the applause, the noisy enthusiasm, the cries of ‘Bravo!', the admiration of the listeners, I cannot describe.\\ The local newspaper mentions \\a very beautiful symphony that deserved all the applause it was given\\. Ten days later father and son give a concert in Mantua. The concert begins with two movements from a new symphony. Twelve programme items later, the delayed last movement of the symphony can add the final festive relish to a three-hour, audience-friendly symphonic sandwich. Neither the composer nor his father has anything against an amputated symphony. People are given what they want: enter­tain­ment. The boy's symphony is served in slices, but after all it's only a symphony.

Those who come to such a concert are fine folk who are looking for serious enter­tain­ment. ­Mozart's father Leopold explains: \\Neither the concert in Mantua nor the one in Verona made any money, for admission was free. It is the privilege of the noblemen to hold these concerts, and in Mantua the nobility, the officers and prominent citizens can attend them free of charge, since they are paid for by Her Majesty the Empress. You will understand that we will not get rich in Italy.\\

Mannheim, 1778. The audience chat at the young Mozart's orchestral concerts. This is quite normal in the eighteenth century, when one can still call a musical gathering a Conversazione. It is a matter of course that there is clapping between the movements, and often also during the music. Mozart tells us how he himself talks so much in the theatre that he can miss a whole opera. Conviviality and sociability took pride of place at the time. The music was considered a part of a totality, but not necessarily the most important part. We have a good deal of information about one of Mozart's favourite ensembles, the court orchestra in Mannheim, at the time probably the best orchestra in Europe. \\They give only 300 concerts a year,\\ writes Mozart unimpressed; what he is referring to is the prince's ‘musical academies' with free admission for everyone. Mozart appears there himself on several occasions.

Normally the princely couple appear with their retinue around six in the evening and sit down at the small tables to the right of the enormous windows of the hall. On the left the orchestra sits on a dais. As soon as the symphony starts, the prince and his guests begin to play cards - and not in silence. Similar situations can be experienced all over Europe. This does not mean that the 18th-century concert audience despises music. They simply use it in a different way from us. A composer must live with this - after all it's only a symphony.

Paris 1778. It is the audience that pays, so it would be stupid not to accommodate them. And if Mozart were to forget this, his father would be sure to remind him, as he does during his son's fateful visit to Paris: \\... take my advice, and remember that your whole reputation depends on the first thing you write. Listen to what the Frenchmen like before you start. Copy it! After all. you can copy anything! I know your abilities. Do not write too fast, ordinary people do not do that if they have all their wits about them,\\ and Mozart accommodates the French audience with among other things the Paris Sym­phony (K297), but he does so on his own way: \\... I had taken my new symphony with me. It has just been finished, and is to begin the next concert on Corpus Christi day. They liked it, and I am also pleased with it myself. But one cannot know if it will become popular, and to tell the truth I do not care either. I can promise that it will please the few intelligent Frenchmen who come. As for the stupid ones, I do not see it as a tragedy if they do not like it. I think that even the fools will find something they like.\\ After the concert the young man is given to understand that the slow movement is not to the taste of the management. Mozart immediately replaces it with a new one. After all, it's only a symphony.

Vienna, 1782. Mozart is learning that if the music publishers are to print his works, he has to meet the many amateur musicians half way. In December he reveals some of his trade secrets in a letter. He talks about piano concertos, but it could just as well be about symphonies: \\they lie somewhere in between what is too easy and what is too difficult. They are brilliant, pleasing to the ear and quite natural, without being empty. There are passages here and there that only connoisseurs can appreciate, but they are written such that those who are not as learned cannot avoid liking them, without knowing why.\\

Some Vienna statistics

At the Burgtheater, where Mozart performs his symphonies and piano concertos, the cheapest boxes cost more than a top civil servant earns in a year. Count Zinzendorf has reserved such a box for 40 years. When he is in Vienna, he goes to the theatre twice a week. It is first and foremost the aristocratic families who pay for expensive concert tickets. They are \\connoisseurs and aficionados\\; some of them take music lessons and perhaps compose a little themselves. Qualified listeners can also be found among the top ranks of the middle class, who consist for example of merchant families, lawyers, university teachers, clerics and officers. All in all, there are a good 15,000 potential customers. Not really that many in a city with a quarter of a million residents.

Mozart kept a book of his customers and accounts of his concert tickets. From his concerts at Trettner's Casino in 1784 we have the names of 174 subscribers, each of whom pays one florin (corresponding to the monthly wage of a chambermaid). We can see that nine out of ten of the audience are aristocrats. Put differently, the aristocracy and the haute-bourgeoisie make up 7% of the population of Vienna, and the aristocracy and the haute-bourgeoisie take up 90% of the seats when concertos and symphonies by Mozart are performed.

At his concerts in Paris there are as a rule more women than men in salons and halls, but here in Vienna only 17% of the audience are women. The Swede Frederik Silverstolpe writes: \\The ­middle class is highly cultivated. Among the so-called better classes one rarely meets the out-and-out idiots one sees back in Sweden. The women are much more well-read here.\\

Yes, the Viennese are cultivated, they come to hear opera arias and solo concertos. But they are not spared the symphonies. In an anonymous article (Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 1800) we read: \\Any special occasion calls for a concert, which always begins with a quartet or a symphony, which is regarded as a necessary evil - after all one has to begin with something or other. As long as it lasts, everyone chats.\\

Vienna 1786. Mozart has apparently begun to make demands on his audience. The Irish tenor Michael Kelly writes: \\Mozart gave Sunday concerts, at which I never was missing .... He was kind-hearted, and always ready to oblige, but so very particular, when he played, that if the slightest noise was made, he instantly left off.\\

Vienna, October 1791. Shortly before Mozart's death, The Magic Flute was performed at the popular Theater auf der Wieden: less aristocratic, texts in German, so they could be understood by ordi­nary functionaries and craftsmen. The author Pezzl writes: \\One is well advised to take a pipe of tobacco with one to mitigate the stink of spilt beer, lamps and sweating people.\\ Was this where Mozart found his favourite audience? His last three symphonies (K543, K550, K551) were now almost three years old. They were to become milestones in the history of music, but few people had realized this yet. After all, they were only sym­pho­nies; but here he sat, ill but contented, among ordinary people at a major suburban theatre, pleased with his new opera The Magic Flute. The duet and the glockenspiel piece had to be encored, like the scene with the three boys, and the next day he wrote: \\But what gives me the greatest pleasure is the silent appreciation.\\